Microcosm Twitter Bot Header Image

Microcosm Twitter Bot

I set a goal for #30DayDev January to create a Twitter bot, there weren’t many requirements beyond that it had to retweet people using the hashtag. I can say that after the first week of January I have achieved that goal and released DevMicrocosm into the wild. It followed my rough plan for the project, using Python and Tweepy. This combination of language and library reaffirmed my expectation that it would be quick to develop and deploy.

Due to the Python being able to test commands directly in the terminal, it led to some fantastic opportunities to rapidly prototype some ideas, one of these was to use fully fledged configurations for multiple hashtags. This means that there is no need to redeploy the application every time you want to update what hashtags are being retweeted, you can simply change the config file and the next time the python file is run it’ll use the updated settings.

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30daydev plan header image

#30DayDev January

Sometime during 2016, I helped my friend Liam Twose found the hashtag #30DayDev and push it to become of the most widely used game development hashtags on Twitter with a huge number of people actively taking part and even more people seeing the content being developed by the hashtags ever-increasing reach. However, throughout 2017 activity wained as algorithms on hashtags were changed and focus was directed elsewhere into other endeavours. We decided it would be a good thing for the game development community at large to try and revive the hashtag going into the new year and this is what this post will cover, my plan of action for the first #30DayDev of 2018.

This month will be the first month I’ve gone into with a solid plan of how to tackle #30DayDev pretty much since its inception. I’m not solely focusing on game development this month with some time being dedicated to trying to help revive the hashtag as well. I’m essentially splitting my 30 days into 3 tasks; Twitter Bot, Super Blasty Blasty V2 and knowledge sharing. Between these 3 tasks, I think I should be able to learn a fair few new things as well as produce some quality content.

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